


I’m All There Right Next to You

by dynamicsymmetry



Series: Angels in the Architecture [2]
Category: Harsh Realm
Genre: Established Relationship, Hand Jobs, M/M, Porn with Feelings, Post-Canon, Romance, Skinny Dipping, awkward conversations about sexual orientation initiated by someone entirely unequipped, surprise picnics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-24
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-16 04:54:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28950735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dynamicsymmetry/pseuds/dynamicsymmetry
Summary: Two weeks after the reunion of Mike Pinocchio and Tom Hobbes results in a very unexpected development in their relationship, they have a picnic by a lake, which is naturally the perfect time to ask Mike about his bisexuality. If you’re Tom.
Relationships: Tom Hobbes/Mike Pinocchio
Series: Angels in the Architecture [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2123334
Comments: 1
Kudos: 2





	I’m All There Right Next to You

**Author's Note:**

> I knew I was going to come back to these dopes and this universe eventually, and look at this. 
> 
> Harsh Realm is one of those canons that lives in my head pretty much forever, making it relatively easy to dip in and out as the mood takes me with long stretches of time in between (Christ knows why, it’s not as though it’s a particularly amazing show) and I have notes for this series knocking around and getting picked at. So I doubt very much this will be the last one of these little one-shot addendums I do, but I have no idea how soon it’ll happen. Could be next week, could be another year or longer. 
> 
> Anyway, I was mildly stunned that anyone read the previous fic and I am mildly stunned that you’re reading this one. I’m very happy that you are, though. I hope you enjoy it. ❤️

“So how come I never knew you liked guys?”

Mike blinks at him for a moment, the apple in his hand paused halfway to his mouth. Doesn’t answer. Tom looks back at him and tries with an especially focused effort to keep from fidgeting. It’s one of those things where he didn’t really _mean_ to ask the question, but it’s been percolating for a while now—really well over a week—and sooner or later it was going to emerge whether or not he consciously intended it to.

It’s been percolating for a week, although nearly two weeks ago is when Tom discovered the truth of what he’s just asked. Odd, now that he thinks about it, that it took him this long.

Possibly because it’s the kind of question that could lead very easily to some awkward conversation. And while awkwardness isn’t something he fears between them nearly as much as he did, and he wasn’t even all that afraid of it before given what a common thing it had become...

Mike is still blinking at him.

Yeah, this is going to be awkward.

“I dunno,” Mike says at last, dryly. “Was it something you were watching for?”

“No, it—” Tom stops, a bit flustered, and annoyed at himself for being flustered. Annoyed at himself for asking the question here and now, sitting on the bank of a small and very beautiful lake on an equally beautiful spring afternoon. He hasn’t seen this lake before, although Mike once mentioned _a pond_ in the context of fishing, and once the most labor-intensive of the daily chores were done, Mike grabbed him and a pack and led him a couple of miles down a narrow trail through dense woods until all at once the world opened out into waving grass and willows, water gently lapping sandy soil and exposed rock as the breeze raises little peaks on its surface.

The grass here is soft. The willow a few yards away drapes them in cool dappled shade. The pack proved to contain apples and bread and goat cheese fresh from the spring house built on a nearby stream, and, incredibly, a bottle of white wine. Chardonnay. Bottled pre-fall-of-civilization wine is still out there, but increasingly difficult to get hold of. Somehow Mike, in classic Mike Pinocchio fashion, managed to find some.

Three days ago Mike made a trip into town, and wouldn’t let Tom come and was notably secretive about what he brought back. So: The two of them, and fruit and cheese and bread and an open bottle of wine spread out on a blanket. A picnic. By a lake. A surprise picnic by a lake, with surprise wine from the Before Times.

_Romantic_ would never have been a word Tom would have thought to attach to Mike Pinocchio, and yet as it turns out, he can be. In his weird, surreal way.

Extraordinarily so.

And now Tom has gone and made it awkward.

“I didn’t think about it at all,” he says, and feels vaguely pathetic. “I didn’t...” He shrugs. At some point he might want to seriously consider finding a conversational off-ramp. “I saw you with—with women all the time, I guess I just assumed.”

Mike’s mouth twitches. “Y’know what they say about _assuming,_ Hobbes?” He bites into the apple and raises a thumb to catch the juice that trickles down his chin, and Tom nearly reaches out and seizes his hand, brings that glistening thumb to his mouth to taste the sweetness.

Too late. He should have done it. It would have been a perfect distraction.

Also it would just have been nice to do.

“I do know,” he says instead. “And I never thought it was funny.”

“Why? Has it mostly been at your expense?”

Tom rolls his eyes, swats in Mike’s general direction. He’s discovered that sleeping with Mike doesn’t in the least reduce the amount of shit he’s inclined to give you, but there’s no longer much of an edge to any of it. It’s teasing rather than casually lashing out for the hell of it. Anyway, Mike Pinocchio would no longer be Mike Pinocchio if he ever cut that out.

And Mike Pinocchio is the man Tom came here for and stayed here for. The whole grouchy, scarred, difficult, beautiful package.

In any case, this sort of teasing is almost always operating on multiple levels, and he immediately senses which level this is. Mike is providing the desired distraction for him. Mike is herding him toward the off-ramp, where they exchange playful jabs and then possibly playful other things that may involve various states of undress until both of them have forgotten all about it.

Except neither of them would forget. There would only be an unspoken mutual agreement to pretend they have. And now that Tom is considering that outcome, it’s hitting him how much he dislikes the prospect of it.

They’re only here on the bank of a surprise lake having a weirdly romantic picnic with surprise wine because they _finally_ started being honest with each other—really because Mike broke and started being honest first. So shouldn’t honesty be the name of the game from now on?

Shouldn’t he be able to talk to Mike about anything without fear of some unspecified but unfortunate consequences?

He sighs inwardly. Maybe someday.

“I’m serious,” he says quietly, shifting his gaze to the water and the heron winging its way slowly across to the other side. The sun catches its feathers and brings out the blue from the slate gray. All these little details, noticed now. “Look, you weren’t...” He flicks his eyes back to Mike. This is important. “You weren’t hiding it from me or anything, were you?”

He’s expecting Mike to snort and/or scoff and/or insult him and/or throw a piece of cheese at his face. But none of those things is happening. Instead Mike is simply looking at him, his expression gone unreadable. The blue in his eyes seems to have darkened to the slate gray of the heron’s feathers.

Little details.

“Maybe I was,” Mike murmurs. “I don’t think I meant to. Shouldn’t give a shit about that kind of thing. But yeah. Yeah, maybe I was.”

“Why?” The clear blue sky abruptly feels darker, as if it’s keeping with an emerging pattern. Fuck, he wishes he hadn’t brought this up, or at least that he’d waited until a different time and setting. But. “Why would you feel like you needed to?”

A pained edge creeps into Mike’s very faint smile. “I dunno, can you think of any reasons?”

Yes, he can. He lived in that world too. He knows all the ugly words for what they are to each other now, even if those words never passed his lips. He folds his legs, hunches over them, reaches over the blanket and plucks a few blades of grass and works them between his fingers until the pads are stained green. “I just don’t know why you’d think I was like that.”

“You’re a nice fuckin’ corn-fed midwestern boy in the Army who was about to marry his literal high school sweetheart.” Mike’s voice is low and smooth and doesn’t remotely match his expression. “I don’t know why you’d think I _wouldn’t_ even a tiny bit think you might be like that.” He exhales heavily and reaches for the wine bottle; no fancy glasses for them, or even cups. They are, after all, still who they are. Even if the realm of _who they are_ has expanded. “Anyway, like I said, if I was hiding it, I wasn’t really thinking about it. There are just...” He takes a large swig and shrugs, holds out the bottle. “You get into these damn habits, you think you dumped ‘em, and then they pop up again.”

“The habit of hiding it?” Because his initial hurt is beginning to dissipate under the heat and the light of burgeoning comprehension.

He thinks he gets it. And it sucks.

Nod. “When you give a shit about what someone thinks of you.”

Tom’s eyebrows rise. “Since when did you ever give a shit about what I thought of you?”

Mike gazes levelly at him. Picks at a bit of cheese. “Since pretty much always.”

“No fucking way.”

“Absolutely way.” Mike huffs. “And I resented you like hell for it, so there.”

He pauses, and the silence stretches out, and Tom turns the bottle in his hand and watches the wine slosh against the sides and isn’t sure what to put into that empty sonic space, until softly, Mike speaks again.

“I think you can hate someone for making you fall in love with them. A little.”

Tom raises his eyes and swallows. Once this wouldn’t have made the slightest sense to him. But that was then, and it was quite literally a whole other world. “I did think you hated me most of the time.” A beat, and the corner of his mouth curls. His chest is aching. It took him so goddamn long to figure it out. He didn’t, until it was unignorably shoved in his face. “But you never left.”

“I never left,” Mike echoes, still soft.

Unspoken: _Until_.

“I don’t want you to feel like you have to hide anything from me,” Tom whispers, and Mike sets the bottle down and curls a hand around the nape of his neck and pulls him in, and the kiss is deep and hungry and goes on for a while, and Tom is gasping and his nerves are humming when it finally breaks.

For so long he knew Sophie’s kiss to almost complete exclusion. Now he’s getting to know this one, and it’s so fascinatingly different—rough and aggressive, the scrape of stubble and thrust of tongue and edge of teeth. Except for when it’s not like that, when it’s lazy and gentle, and even then it couldn’t be more distinct.

Lazy and gentle, which it is by the end, and somehow the world tips and comes to rest with them both horizontal and a bit tangled, Tom’s head and hand on Mike’s chest and the steady thud of a strong heart in his ear. The sun through the willow boughs is like warm fingertips on his cheek, and it occurs to him that in addition to surreal, the Mike Pinocchio species of romance is heady and impulsive and very slightly desperate. Nothing carefully planned or orchestrated, no satin sheets or rose petals scattered on the bed, and that’s part of what makes it so dizzying.

That and the thought that this was in him the entire time.

_Did I_ ever _know this man? Did I really?_

Tom shifts. “I did use to be kind of. Y’know. Uncomfortable about it.” Not disgusted or repelled, certainly not of the opinion that anything about it was immoral. It was more that it made him feel awkward whenever faced with it in person, as if he didn’t know what to do with his eyes or hands. “I don’t feel like that now.”

“Yeah, I figured,” Mike murmurs, wryly amused, “given that last night I was balls deep in your ass and you were begging me for more.”

Tom flicks his side, the stretch of exposed skin just beneath the hem of his shirt. “Fuck you.”

“Anytime, dick.”

Tom rolls his eyes but for a few moments there isn’t anything else. Just the hiss of leaves, and birdsong across the water and through the trees. What kind of birds? He has no idea.

Maybe it’s time to learn. Maybe Mike knows. Maybe Mike can teach him.

“So I was the first one,” Mike says quietly.

Tom raises his head. “The first guy I was with?” He’s about to say _yes,_ naturally Mike is the first, only with a slight jolt he suddenly remembers that isn’t quite true, and although it’s a memory he’s put away for a long time, there’s no reason to not say so now. “Sort of. Not—not exactly.”

Mike arches a brow. “You realize now you gotta tell me everything.”

“I do, yeah.” Tom breathes a laugh and lays his head down again, his fingers tracing idle little spirals over worn fabric. “I was in high school.”

“Of course you were.”

“I played football,” Tom goes on, firmly ignoring him. It’s a skill he’s had to cultivate. “I wasn’t any good but I did anyway—for like a year until they asked me to stop.”

Soft laugh. Nothing else.

“There was this kid on the team, backup quarterback. But everyone treated him like he was the starter and all the girls wanted to date him, because he was big and he looked like a movie star, like he had this _swagger_.”

“Which one?”

“Hm?”

“Which movie star?” Mike asks patiently.

Tom frowns. “I dunno. Just a movie star. You know, a—What’s the word? An _archetype_. The overall concept. No one specific.” Exhale. “Anyway, like I said, all the girls loved him, but he hardly ever went out with any of them, and even when he did... There was something about it. Something weird. Like it wasn’t totally...”

“Real.”

“Yeah, exactly. Like I was watching an act. I couldn’t pin it down at the time, but that’s what it was like.” Pause. “That’s what it was.”

Silence from Mike. The silence has a _go on_ quality, as if he’s making space for Tom to fill.

“Anyway, there was this one time after practice, it was just me and him in the locker room. In the showers. I don’t remember why it was only us, I guess it was just one of those things.” One of those things that happens.

That comes out of nowhere and subtly changes everything.

“I turned around and he was right there. Like inches away. I never heard him come over.” Tom swallows. Out of nowhere he’s fighting back a shiver. There is a reason why he put this memory in a box in one of the more shadowy recesses of his mind. “He just... He kissed me. It wasn’t like he forced me, and I wasn’t fighting him. He just did it. I guess maybe I was too shocked to do anything.”

Except it wasn’t merely shock, and he knows that now.

“He kissed me and I—I remember I kissed him back. I didn’t even think about it, I just did. Not, like, _deep,_ couldn’t have been more than a few seconds, but. And then he started to, y’know, reach down.” And it should have been frightening, should have felt like an assault, and in fact he knows perfectly well that that’s probably what it technically almost was...

And it didn’t feel that way. He remembers how it felt now, with a vividness that shakes him. The heat and the slickness. The overwhelming, knee-weakening sense of a bigger and stronger body so close to his. The electricity racing up and down his spine.

“I pushed his hand away,” he says, low. A little husky. “It was a reflex. He was there a couple more seconds and then he was gone. I didn’t see him leave. It was like he vanished.” So quickly and so completely that for a long time after, Tom wasn’t altogether positive it happened at all. He took a good knock on the head during practice; perhaps it was a hallucination. He thought of it as if it had been.

But in his secret heart he knew better.

“He didn’t try it again after that. Acted like I didn’t even exist, actually. I don’t think he ever said another word to me.”

“Yeah,” Mike murmurs, and in that single word there’s so much weariness and old pain that it stabs into Tom’s chest like a blade. “That’s how it goes.”

And Tom wonders, although he can’t scrape together the words to ask directly, whether Mike was ever in that situation.

What role he would have been in.

“There was never anyone else. I dunno why, I just didn’t think about it. I never looked at another guy like that. There wasn’t anybody until you.” He shakes himself. There’s nothing else to tell, and this is all still very confusing. And maybe he can’t ask Mike about it directly, but that doesn’t mean he can’t sidle up to the issue in general. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“I mean, I’m guessing I wasn’t the first one.”

“No,” Mike says, and the flat twist in his voice is plainly discernible. “You sure as shit weren’t.”

“So when did you... know?” Tom’s teeth capture his lip. This is something else he’s wondered about over the course of the last couple of weeks—why there wasn’t anyone else after that. Any other boy, any other man that ever caught his eye or got him thinking. Why it never consciously occurred to him that his tastes might not be inclined in one direction alone, why there’s apparently some room for _flexibility_ in himself that he never really knew about. “That you weren’t only into women.”

“Early,” Mike says immediately. Doesn’t hesitate. Doesn’t resist. _I don’t want you to feel like you have to hide anything from me_. “Had to have been something like... ten? Eleven?”

Tom sucks in a breath. Trying to wrap his head around it. “Wow.”

“I was starting to notice girls,” Mike continues, and that wryness has crept back in, and Tom recognizes it now for what it is: a deeply engrained defense mechanism. Like so many other things he does. “And I knew that was totally normal. But it wasn’t all girls. And I knew that was fucking _not_.”

“That must’ve been scary.”

“It was confusing. Then it was scary. Once I figured out what it meant, it was scary. Except I _still_ didn’t really know what it meant, because who the fuck knows at that age that there’s more than two options? I thought I was a freak.” Mike releases a heavy breath. “You know one option is fine. And the other one gets you killed.”

Tom raises his head again, brow furrowed. Mike’s eyes are on the sky now, on the streaks of white cloud racing across the blue. But they’re unfocused. Distant, like his tone has become.Before there was pain and weariness, and now Tom can hear, unmistakably, the echo of bone-deep fear.

It makes him angry.

“Other kids?” Those ugly words, and then much more and much uglier than words.

“That,” Mike says, “and also it was the eighties. And it was New York.”

It takes Tom a moment to understand. Then he does, and all his blood freezes into delicate crystals of ice.

What he says is: “I didn’t know you grew up in New York.”

“Queens.”

“You don’t have much of an accent.”

Mike laughs. It’s cold and it’s bitter and for a bad instant Tom senses the coldness and the bitterness directed at him—directed at him in the way Mike does, which is to say he fires his own pain like a bullet at whoever happens to be in range, whether or not they’re the source of it.

They‘re still who they are. And Mike is still Mike. There are some things about him which love likely won’t change in a lifetime, let alone two weeks.

“No, I don’t.”

“It was the eighties,” Tom says, feeling dimly frantic. Prodding and also not prodding at all. “So you were—”

“I thought I was gonna die,” Mike says simply. “I was a teenager and I looked around and I thought _okay, if you’re a boy who likes boys this is just what happens to you._ You get sick and you die, and you die hard and alone.” His eyes snap onto Tom so suddenly and sharply that Tom almost gasps. They’re blue ice chips. “Unless you don’t give into it. You keep it in and you keep it secret. Forever.” His gaze drifts away again. “Also, yeah, I was in Catholic school and there was the whole thing where if anyone found out there were even odds I’d get beaten to death.”

“I’m sorry,” Tom breathes. God, he is.

It explains so much.

“ _You know a boy who likes boys is a dead boy, unless he keeps his mouth shut,_ ” Mike says, and it has the lower, rhythmic quality of quoting someone else’s words. His expression briefly wrenches into an awful smile. “ _Which is what you didn’t do._ You get it,” he adds, very quiet again. “What that kid risked. With you. I’m not saying he should’ve done it, at least not the way he did, I’m just saying.”

“Yeah.” He didn’t get it then. He does now.

“He must’ve really liked you. Must’ve thought he saw something that wasn’t there.”

Softness in him now. Softness that aches. Tom squeezes his eyes shut. He never expected any of this to be easy. There’s too much scar tissue, and not all of it will ever stretch.

“I guess he must’ve.”

“Anyway.” Mike sighs again, and his fingers are working into Tom’s hair, stroking, and Tom knows it’s to soothe himself as much as anything else. There are times, not always but now and then, when there’s a kind of fierce defiance in Mike’s touch that transcends any easy words. As if he’s striking against an invisible monster. Or grabbing for something before it can be snatched away. “Then I graduated and joined up, and I bet you can guess how that was.”

“There were a couple of guys in my platoon once,” Tom says slowly. “They never did anything where anyone could see, but we all... We all basically knew. No one ever made anything of it.”

“You think it would’ve stayed that way if they had done something where someone _could_ see?” Not disputing. Merely pointing out a fact, and a self-evident one. “It’s not about not _being that way._ You can _be that way_.” Terrible bitterness again. “As long as you stay in line. As long as you fuckin’ behave.”

Tom nearly smiles. “I can’t imagine you did.”

“Bet your cute ass I didn’t.”

Tom laughs, uncontained and a bit surprised. No one in his life has ever called his ass cute, and he definitely doesn’t hate it. Particularly not when he knows it’s sincerely meant.

“But you still kept it a secret.”

“Well, did I get discharged?” Mike slings his other arm over his forehead and closes his eyes. “Not until I went and blew myself the hell up. Yeah, I kept it a secret.”

A brief moment with no words, and for an unwanted second Tom can’t stop his mind from creating an image he’s never seen: Mike’s face, his real face, the right half of it mutilated with twisted pink and gray burn scars, the eye milky and blind.

Then: “I found places to go on leave. Let off steam. Of course by then I knew how to, y’know. Not get sick and die. Minimize the odds, anyway.”

_Places_. Mike has given him shit about being naive and sheltered, but Tom can imagine exactly what kinds of places Mike means. It hurts, how easy it is to picture him there. A man he saw _letting off steam_ with random women time after time out there in the hell of the Realm, without ever the most minimal indication that he was after more than a quick fuck in a patch of grimy shadow.

And yet there was the first night with him. The gentle reverence in his touch. How slow he wanted to take it. How it was as if he held each second in his hands for as long as he could and treated it as something precious.

As if in all those years, he did want it to be that way. He simply never allowed himself to have it.

“Did you ever have a girlfriend?”

“A couple. Nothing serious, it never lasted.” The bitterness has bled out of him, and in its place is the barest hint of tired sadness. “What if she found out? Sooner or later she would, I was good at hiding it but I wasn’t _that_ good.”

“You hid it from me. For years.”

“Yeah, dick, you’re fuckin’ oblivious most of the time.”

Tom breathes another laugh. He wouldn’t actually try to argue with that. So instead of arguing he turns his face more firmly against Mike’s chest and rubs, nuzzles him, and Mike’s sigh isn’t quite so sad.

“I’m sorry.”

Mike’s fingers pause their idle passage through Tom’s hair. “For what?”

“I’m sorry you felt like you had to hide it.” Tom settles his palm flat against that steady beat, feels it rise and fall, listens to the air flowing in and out of Mike’s lungs. A tide into twin oceans. “I don’t just mean with me, I mean ever. I’m sorry you went through that.”

_I’m sorry you felt like you couldn’t let anyone get close._

Mike lifts a shoulder in a reclining shrug. “Ran outta shits to give once I got here. Place like this, who fuckin’ cares what you do? Except then you showed up and it all came back.” His nails dig lightly into Tom’s scalp. “Apologize again and I’ll kick your ass. It wasn’t your fault.”

No, it wasn’t—at least not in a way that would demand remorse, and in any case he’s not inclined in that direction. The urge he feels is not to attempt an apology of any kind. Instead, it’s to sit up and reach for the bottle, put it to his lips and tip it back. The wine is cool and slightly buttery, and while he’s never been what he would consider a Wine Guy, as far as he’s concerned it’s pretty goddamn good.

As far as he’s concerned, it’s perfect.

Rustle above and then behind him; the willow, and then Mike sitting up, plucking the bottle out of his hand. Tom turns to watch Mike’s throat working as he swallows, the bob and flex of the muscles, and he thinks that maybe it’s not so strange that he never looked at Mike this way before, with a flicker of how good it would be to glide his lips down that throat, dip his tongue into the hollows of Mike’s clavicles. Lap at the salt of his skin.

Mike isn’t the only one who’s good at putting inconvenient truths away. Of the two of them, he might not even be the best.

“You’re wrong,” he murmurs.

Mike lowers the bottle, wipes his mouth on the back of his hand and gives Tom a quizzical look. “How’s that?”

“He didn’t see something that wasn’t there. It was there.” Powerful body inches from his. The way it would have felt if that body pinned him against the wall. Frightening, absolutely.

But not only.

Mike simply looks at him. A shadow has fallen across his face, and once more his eyes have taken on that slatey gray hue.

“I did kiss him back. I just wasn’t ready. If everything had been different...” He trails off. He doesn’t know precisely how to finish that thought, but he intuits that it also doesn’t require finishing.

Entire lives are built on _if_.

Mike’s hands are trembling when he extends them. Not fast, and they don’t seize or pull Tom in. Warm, rough palms against the sides of his face, calloused thumbs tracing over his cheekbones. The shadow has moved and Mike’s eyes are no longer darkened; they’re brilliant, and they’re shining.

“I was never supposed have this.” His voice is hoarse and very low, nearly a whisper. The rasp in it doesn’t sound far from tears. “Quick fucks in dark corners, sure. Not this. This was always your kinda thing. It was never mine.”

_Why?_ But he doesn’t have to ask. He closes his fingers around Mike’s wrists and holds them, and Mike’s gaze is suddenly difficult to meet. There’s so much in it, a roiling sea of emotion fathoms deep, but every one of those emotions shares something in common in the sheer desperation with which it’s felt.

He understands fully: Mike was never supposed to have this, or he never believed he was, and now that he does, part of him is certain that it’s merely by virtue of some cosmic mistake, and he lives in the terrified, despairing expectation that at any moment the universe will correct itself and this will be utterly lost to him.

_Stay. Stay with me._

“It’s yours,” Tom breathes, and tips their foreheads together.

In the slightly blurry periphery of his vision, he glimpses a smile, small and sweet. There’s despair in this man, to be sure, and terror, and pain right down to the marrow. But that isn’t all, that isn’t even close to all, and words echo faintly in his mind that are neither his own nor Mike’s—he doesn’t recall where they come from, and he knows they aren’t in quite the correct order.

But they’re right all the same.

_I have rage in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine. And love the likes of which you would not believe._

All at once Mike is releasing him and scooting back, pushing to his feet with a grunt and grasping the hem of his shirt, starting to pull it over his head. Tom sits back and watches him, bemused.

“What’re you doing?”

Mike tosses the shirt aside and reaches down to pull off his boots, goes briskly to work on his pants. “I’m gonna go for a swim.”

He doesn’t invite Tom to come with. No invitation would ever have been necessary.

~

He feels that the water is receiving him in a way unlike anything he’s ever experienced.

Almost since he arrived here, Tom hasn’t been able to shake the sense that there’s something _about_ this place, something uncanny, as if forces beyond his comprehension and beyond any programming or code sustain its existence. That the rules here are subtly different from the rules that govern everywhere else in the Realm. That perhaps this explains why Mike is here at all, why he’s been able to make a home for himself unlike anything Tom ever would have suspected of him, why so many previously concealed parts of him have been able to unfurl and bloom.

Is it any wonder that the lake would be included in that uncanniness?

The water is deliciously cool and it opens to him as he wades out into it and laps gently at his naked skin, the bottom pleasantly gritty between his toes. Mike is further out but not by much, submerged just past his waist, a dark shape against shimmering sky-lit blue turning to wait for him.

Opening to him like the water.

He thought about trailing his lips down Mike’s throat and now he does, pressed hard against him, hands running over the cruel slashes of scar tissue that crisscross Mike’s back, and for a fraction of a second Mike stiffens at the touch—and a fraction only. Then his head drops back between his shoulders and he moans, takes Tom by the hips and cants him forward, and against his adam’s apple Tom breaks into a grin that feels more than a little wild.

Wet, naked body against his, bigger albeit not by much, muscle and power and hunger radiating like heat, bathing Tom like the water, and this time he won’t push anything away.

In a life, we don’t get to circle back around. We don’t get second chances to do it differently.

Until we do.

They swim.

Arcing smoothly through blue-green, rising and falling, skin gliding against skin as they pass each other, half twining in a way that makes Tom think of dolphins. There’s a grace in it that seems to transcend mere physical movement. He allows himself to sink and rolls, gazes blurrily up at the god-rays breaking through the surface, and rises into them, shakes water out of his eyes and floats on his back and soaks in the sun.

Until Mike pounces on him and drags him under. Releases him seconds later and laughs as Tom bobs up again, spluttering. Mike has laughed at him plenty of times before, but they’ve been short sharp barks, the auditory equivalent of a sneer. Mocking him and not kindly.

Mocking, still. But there isn’t a trace of a sneer in it now. It’s playful.

Happy.

_I didn’t know,_ Tom thinks as his feet find the bottom. Mike is moving ahead of him now, turning and taking him by the hand. He’s thought those three words so often in the past few days. Since almost the moment he got here. _I didn’t know he could sound like that._

He didn’t conceive of a world where Mike Pinocchio would ever haul him up on the bank and press him into the grass, lips and tongue coaxing his mouth open, the shape of his smile unmistakable. He couldn’t have conceived of it; he had no raw material to work with, no foundation to build on. In no part of his experience of this man could he have imagined Mike settling half on top of him and scraping his teeth lightly down the line of Tom’s jaw, reaching between his thighs and kneading until Tom is bucking his hips up with a needy hiss.

Might have been able, if he truly stretched the bounds of his imagination, to conjure up a world in which another man took his cock in a firm fist and worked him with long, unhurried strokes. A world in which Tom slipped his hand down between them and returned it in kind, feeling the hard shaft in his palm with a strange species of wonder. With a once-embarrassed flush, he might have gotten there.

Not like this. Not Mike, not Mike shivering and rolling into his grip with a thick groan and a curse, and certainly not lying in the grass with him in the warm spring sunshine, lazily jerking each other off with soft, deep kisses until Mike is releasing a broken sound and going rigid and spilling hot onto Tom’s belly, Tom following him less than a moment later with a shudder and a muffled cry.

Never Mike going loose against him and shaking now and then with aftershocks, his uneven panting gradually easing in the hollow of Tom’s throat. Never wrapping his arms around Mike and simply holding onto him, not remotely giving a shit about the abruptly insistent itch of the grass on his wet skin or the sticky mess on their stomachs and hands. Never staring up into markless blue, his tears drying cool on his temples.

Never Mike’s whispered words, felt rather than heard.

_God, I love you so much._

Never in a hundred thousand fucking years whispering back.

_I love you too._

Whatever he might or might not have been able to imagine no longer matters, to the extent that it ever did. He doesn’t have to imagine it. It’s happening. It’s real. It’s as real as anything in this world or any other.

It’s a long, bizarre, terrible road that led them both here. Some of it he regrets and some of it he hates, although all of it he can forgive. Even before the Realm, the road that led him away from what might have been into the nice, normal, _respectable_ life he believed he was meant to have, and the road that led Mike away from everyone into loneliness and angry self-loathing and eventual destruction. Together, so much cruelty and so much hurt. But always together. Until they weren’t together anymore, and that error has been repaired. 

And what matters isn’t the road itself, its length or its suffering.

What matters is that they got here.

On the blanket, empty wine bottle beside them, he falls asleep in the sinking sun and Mike’s strong arms, until twilight and fireflies send them home.  
  


**Author's Note:**

> The poem Mike quotes a snippet of is “A Primer For The Small Weird Loves” by—who else—Richard Siken. 
> 
> The line Tom is misremembering is from Mary Shelley’s _Frankenstein._


End file.
